The Millbrook Mysteries · Book 2
What the River Keeps
A novel, published 2023
The Mill River runs high every April, and every April the town agrees it is nothing to worry about.
Then the water pulls the bank out from under the old covered bridge and leaves a rusted station wagon sitting in the shallows, doors open, forty years of silt inside.
Nora Beckett remembers the family that owned it. She also remembers the story everyone told about where they went.
Now she has the car, a box of waterlogged photographs, and a selectboard that would very much like the bridge repaired before anybody asks a second question.
Some things a river keeps. Some things it hands back.
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From the opening pages
The first few hundred words of What the River Keeps, so you can hear the voice before you buy it.
The water had gone down enough by Thursday to walk the bank, and half the town walked it.
Nora came late, after the library closed, when the crowd had thinned to the people who actually wanted to look rather than to be seen looking. The station wagon sat twenty feet out in the shallows, tipped slightly downstream, the color of nothing at all. River silt had packed the wheel wells solid. A sapling had grown up through where the rear window used to be, and had been snapped off again by whatever brought the car back into the daylight.
Dale Orcutt stood on the gravel with his hands in his jacket pockets, not going closer.
“Eighty-seven,” he said, to nobody in particular. “That's a seventy-nine. Eighty, maybe. Wagon like that.”
“You knew them,” Nora said.
He did not answer that, which was its own kind of answer. After a while he said that the bridge crew would want the car out before Monday, and that it was a shame about the bank, and that the river had always run mean through there. None of those three things had anything to do with the question she had asked.
Excerpt from What the River Keeps © 2023 Iris Hale.
Praise for What the River Keeps
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“I read the last sixty pages standing up in my kitchen.”
“A mystery that is really about who gets to decide what a town remembers.”
Next in the series
The Ridge Road
The road over the ridge only goes two places, and one of them turns out to be a lie.
Read about book 3